Jim Brown's Farm View on rising fertiliser costs and food shortages?

Over the last 60 years, the number of planes passing have multiplied at an ever increasing pace, until Covid-19 that is nearly two years ago. The change was dramatic.

It has become almost rare to see a plane overhead. How that all changed on the Sunday evening before COP26 – I lost count of the number of aircraft passing overhead. At around 8pm they were landing at Glasgow every two minutes for this summit about pollution.

I just wonder if anyone checked how much pollution this summit caused in Central Scotland because the US entourage that landed at Edinburgh, with its massive gas-guzzling 4 x 4s, before crossing from the Capital city to Scotland’s largest city on the M8; not forgetting the M9 leaders who travelled to and fro from Gleneagles!

There is no doubt these summits must be held. My only consolation was the hope that wee Scotland benefited from the cash that flowed into the economy!

My view on this pollution crisis is that it has been created by world affluence and that is all due to the progress that has taken place in the last 100 years, or even less. I could nearly say it has taken place during my lifetime and yet, in some parts of the world, they do not even know what the word affluence means!

For example, I watched a programme on CNN where they showed a 30-acre field being ploughed by two oxen pulling a single furrow plough. The contrast was a similar 30 acre area being ploughed by a large tractor and a five-furrow reversible plough – 'affluence' or 'progress'?

If climate change is the current headline news, I can predict the next headliner will be food-shortages! The main cause of which will be crippling fertiliser costs across the world, with the exception of Russia.

The massive impact that prilled, or granular fertiliser has had on food production, has happened during my lifetime. As a boy, I watched as my father, plus half a dozen staff, mixed powdered N, P and K, with shovels, on a floor next to the barn, then bag it before it was spread on the land from a hand-sheet that hung around the person’s neck!

Dung in those days was carted by horse and cart to the fields, hawked out in coups, eight yards apart, to be later spread by staff with graips to fertilise the land. Most farms at that time in this part of Lanarkshire were mixed, with the majority being dairy, growing grass, turnips, kale, tatties, oats, wheat, bean, or marshlum (a mix of beans and oats for protein).

Barley yields were a fraction of what they are today and that is nearly worldwide, so what has changed the world’s food production? I remember my father’s first fertiliser spreader called Clydebuilt, that went on the three-point linkage of a wee grey Fergie tractor.

He said then that a revolution was taking place with this new method of spreading fertiliser which was the start of crop yields expanding. I think I am correct in saying that today's crop yields are at least four times greater than they were after the World War II.

Fertiliser is key to food production. When I started farming in 1963, 20-10-10 compound was £14 per tonne. Today we are in the £700 region. Straight nitrogen then was £10/tonne, it is £650 today.

Russia’s Putin holds the trump cards. In Scotland, we will need the Cambo oil and gas deposits off Shetland to be tapped into to allow us to combat that control. Neither Putin, nor the Chinese leader attended COP26, not will they need a war to control the world. Starve it of fertiliser and they will have absolute control by food starvation!

Food production in the future will be like turning the clock back 100 years, by using fertiliser from cattle in the form of dung and slurry. In 2006, this farm invested heavily in increasing slurry storage from six weeks to seven months and reduced our bagged fertiliser use from 120 tonnes to less than 10 tonnes, as have thousands of other livestock farms.

Government now needs to come out with financial help to encourage all livestock farms to increase storage in order to combat the tripling (or crippling) cost of fertiliser, and so help food production.

But, what of the arable farms with no livestock dung to combat this vast increase in costs, which I am told, also includes sprays of agrochemicals? Will they return to keeping livestock? Will it be a reduction in yields of cereals? It will be interesting to see how they tackle this new world of vast cost increases.

A surprise, this past week, has been the resignation of the QMS chief executive, Alan Clarke, who, like his predecessor, had done an admirable job, in what was a difficult period for all sectors of our meat industry, none more so than pigs.

So, with Alan’s parting, maybe it is time for some fresh thinking and hopefully we do not go down the same road as the potato guys with AHDB! I would be reluctant to put money on a poll for survival of QMS because it does not have to look far for its critics right now, some valid and some not so justified.

Maybe it should go back and look at its core role of promotion and marketing and forget about all the other things in which it has become involved. A good example would be to look at Ireland’s Board Bia. Now that we are out of the EU and effectively a third world country, a change in direction might not be the worst thing!

Covid-19 still crops up every day and I watched a programme on CNN about Montgomery Co in the US where 99% of its population were vaccinated, resulting in its hospitals being back to pre-Covid levels. It was not like Austria, but very close to mandatory and it has a population, I think, not far behind Scotland.

It used several methods to convince all age groups about the benefits of vaccination and it seems to have worked. Maybe in this country we should have made it mandatory, with a few exceptions.

Yes, I know some will disagree, but in my lifetime vaccines have saved many lives from a number of diseases. It is sad to hear that of the number of people taking up hospital beds today, 90% had not been vaccinated – which surely tells us that the vaccination scheme is successful!

Fly-tipping is a regular rural problem featured in this publication. Only this morning, in the entrance of a Scottish Gas facility a mile away, a 7.5-tonne lorry had tipped a load of bathroom accessories, including toilet, bath, plasterboard, plastic pipes, glass door and even a TV!

In this area, it is mostly because the council refuses to accept any vehicle, other than a car, into their refuse tip! No trailers, or vans are allowed in, so, the next best place is to dump their rubbish in the nearest farm gateway, or on the side of our country roads.

All my life, when I do not understand something, I have kept asking questions until I find an answer that I do understand.

By far the majority of our farms in Scotland are in grass, some very productive, some not so and some very poor. Many only grow grass and yet there is untold talk about the so-called emissions these farms produce.

Can someone tell me how these emissions are measured in a simple way that I can understand and secondly, if they are to be reduced, how is it to be done, other than removing all stock and letting it run wild.

This begs the question, how is the population going to be fed? I have asked several farmers – some half my age or less – and I can tell you I am not alone in trying to find a simple answer as to how we farm in the future without even more red tape.